How our global cultural identities are revealed in clothing and trade routes of textiles

Jan 07, 2003

The old adage we are what we wear recently took on a worldwide perspective at a one-day workshop followed by a three-day international conference at the University of Wollongong.

The globalisation conference attracted the world’s foremost academics and practising artists and focused on cultural distinctions in textile production and trade in Canada, India, the Pacific and Australia. Conference participants examined how the wearing of international textiles creates various cultural identities and how writers and the makers of history create stories (fiction and non-fiction) that make up our post-colonial world.

One of the features of the conference, entitled Fabric(ation)s of the Postcolonial, was a keynote address by the best selling author of "Carpet Wars", Christopher Kremmer. Kremmer’s early short stories won several awards. He has worked for several years as foreign correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

From 1997 he was South Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Conference organiser Lycia Trouton, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Creative Arts, said the conference was of great significance to the visual arts, English literature and materials cultural anthropology, as well as cultural communications studies communities, and aboriginal communities.

An art exhibition, Unfolding Territories, which features indigenous and non-indigenous artwork was held in the Cloisters Gallery, Faculty of Creative Arts, in conjunction with the conference. A larger travelling exhibition, featuring the unusual pairing of historical colonial textiles with contemporary textiles, will follow in 2003-2004.

The conference was held under the auspices of the University’s Institute for Social Change and Critical Inquiry. It also received support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, The Australian-India Council, the Centre for Research in Image, Performance and Text and the Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies.

Pictured above at the textiles workshop preceding the conference are Diana Wood-Conroy (left) whose research centres on the relationship between art, archaeology and materials culture and textiles. Wood-Conroy's artwork is held in public and private collections in Australia and overseas; and Yvonne Koolmatrie, Ngarrindjeri fibre artist who is an expert in rush basketry, revived in the 1980s. Her artwork has been shown in major national exhibitions and her eel trap, like the one shown here in the exhibition, which will accompany the art exhibition called Unfolding Territories, was exhibited in the Venice Biennale 'Fluent', 1997. Conference participants examined how the wearing of international textiles creates various cultural identities and how writers and the makers of history create stories (fiction and non-fiction) that make up our post-colonial world.

Pictured above during the conference are Dorothy Jones (left) an Honorary Fellow, University of Wollongong, and one of the major literary critics of Australian and post-colonial women's writing; Kay Lawrence (centre), a tapestry artist and Head of the School of Architecture, Design and Visual Communications, University of South Australia; and Janis Jeffries, Director, Constance Howard Textile Research Centre, Goldsmiths College, London.